Hack. A. Thon.

[KChester]

Hi guys. Hive76 is discussing what their hackathon theme should be,
and I saw an interesting post. See, they deal with hackathons
different from us - while your own projects are allowed, socializing
is toned down and there is very often a theme to get people to work on
the same overall project together. This is one of the suggested things
from this discussion, and struck me as something our Biohacking
contingent might be interested in:
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Hi all!
One of the people I went to Haiti with is currently working the
shoreline in Louisiana (she's from New Orleans) and called me up on
Friday to talk about cream separators. For given concentrations of oil
in water, there are polymerizing agents (even a few non-toxic ones)
that turn it into "ribbons" that can be easily removed from water,
even in coastal marshes. There aren't, however, any small scale
equivalents to Kevin Costner's gigantic centrifuge ships that can
concentrate oil to those levels. We came up with the idea that
hackerspaces, with their crazy open-source ideas and fancy fabrication
machines, could, given a good design, churn out a number of doohickeys
capable of that kind of thing, post the plans on the internet,
continuously improve them, etc. etc. You know, the kind of stuff the
open source future was supposed to be about.
We started with the idea of a cream separator because its a tabletop
centrifugal concentrator that extracts semi-emulsified non-polar
viscous liquids from water in a continuous process. A separator is a
stack of closely-spaced slightly-conical metal discs, that spins
around its symmetric axis. Raw milk pours in through the center, and
is driven by centrifugal force into the spaces between the discs,
where it separates under the equivalent of a few thousand g-forces.
The discs both prevent turbulence and also provide a back-channel for
cream, which is excluded back towards the center column along the
upper surfaces of the discs (hence the conical shape.) At the bottom
of the center column is the cream tap, and a collection tap around the
edge allows milk flow. The machines themselves generally consist of
the centrifuge core, a collecting bowl, a gearbox, and either a crank
or a belt-flywheel, depending on scale, and their invention dates back
to an era in
which even the best shops would have been less equipped than the
average tinkerer's basement today.
Now, some considerations:
1) First and foremost, centrifuges are not working in the gulf as
water purifiers. So far as I know, there is no mechanism that can take
in oil-contaminated water, and put out clean, potable water.
Centrifuges can remove oil, but the water output is still considered
toxic effluent and must be discharged "inside the boom" i.e. back into
the slick. This is a question of efficiency, yes, but not one we're
likely to solve. Hence, the goal of this project is to produce less-
contaminated water at one tap, and polymerizable concentrations of oil
at the other.
2) Milkfats are emulsified by proteins and phospholipids, but the oil
spill is (partly) emulsified by dispersants that are... well possibly
different. Goat's milk is emulsified with a different profile of gunk
than cow's milk, and one effect of this is that cow cream separators
don't work well on goat milk (or possibly require different flow
rates, turning speeds, etc.) Any device would need to be flexible and
tested. A lot.
3) Cream separators are relatively low-flow mechanisms.
Decontaminating the gulf with 300-lb-per-hour flow rates would take a
lot of kids standing around cranking. Right now there are plenty of
underskilled volunteers in the gulf, but its probably worthwhile to
come up with an unattended motive force supply. Grace (my NOLA friend)
suggested wave action or windmills; I defer to anyone who understands
what wave action means.
4) Cream separators are food-grade products. An oil separator would
only have to be safe for environmental use, which means we could
consider little tricks like coating the cream-return surface with Rain-
X.
5) Lets try to keep this as much as possible to parts that can be
acquired either at home depot, from a laser sheet metal cutter, or
from a small 3-d printer, stick to off-the-shelf motors, etc.
Okay, now go!
A
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It's a unique way of thinking about a hackathon - thinking up a
problem and just pooling our resources and energies to fix that
problem.

[Rick Anderson]

Keith,

Thanks for sending this out. I think that it's a worthwhile project,
and fits within our group goals. I think that the personal projects
are great, and that's a big part of why I'm here. I like the balloon
project, because it's challenge and a group project that keeps us
involved and in friendly competition with other hackers spaces. I
think a project that is about a big cause like this is needed too.
This would be something for new and old members looking for projects
to make a difference. It shows we're aware and want to help in the big
issues around us.

-_Rick

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